I've re-read the documentation a few times but I'm not seeing an explicit Yay or Nay about this.
We're on TNEW and looking at turning on Guest Checkout. I understand this it will create new accounts that have a Guest Checkout indicator on them and we can suppress these folks in lists and all that fun stuff. But what I'm not clear on is whether or not we can merge a Guest Checkout account with a regular account and still maintain that guest checkout functionality for that specific email address?
For example, if a donor or subscriber decide to make a new donation or purchase online using a new email address and guest checkout, we want that transaction to be on their regular account. The easiest way to do that would be to merge them rather than haphazardly trying to move them from one account to another.
What I'm not clear on is what happens to that Guest Checkout flag once a merge happens? If it is maintained, is it still attached to the correct email address? What if they have multiple on file? What if they do additional guest checkouts using more email addresses and they also get merged? Or does is remove the guest checkout flag and they are no longer able to do that in the future using that email address?
If you have this function enabled can you please share your process with me?
Thanks very much!
These are two issues we never really got through when we were trying to implement Guest Checkout. One big problem was the email address: if a customer had an email address/login already attached to an existing account, they _could not_ use Guest Checkout. They got a fairly poorly worded message about needing to log in instead. We may not have figured everything out properly, but that was something we couldn't get past.
Merging a Guest Checkout account is also something I never really sorted, largely on account of stumbling on the last one. I believe you would need to have custom SQL run in the post merge procedure to do something with the flag (either delete or translate it into some other flag to retain the knowledge that a Guest Checkout account merge happened.
If you sort through these issues, do please let us know how! We desperately want to get it working somehow.
Ha! Yes, the first issue you note is definitely a huge turn off for us as well. We were hoping that we could configure the wording of the message they see and try to spin it as positively as we could. But to be honest, if we aren't able to merge these accounts with regular accounts then that's the biggest deal breaker for us right now. In a perfect world, everyone could just use it with any email address (existing or not) and we could merge the crap out of all of them. :)